Roadmap on printable electronic materials for next-generation sensors

The dissemination of sensors is key to realizing a sustainable, ‘intelligent’ world, where everyday objects and environments are equipped with sensing capabilities to advance the sustainability and quality of our lives—e.g., via smart homes, smart cities, smart healthcare, smart logistics, Industry 4.0, and precision agriculture. The realization of the full potential of these applications critically depends on the availability of easy-to-make, low-cost sensor technologies. Sensors based on printable electronic materials offer the ideal platform: they can be fabricated through simple methods (e.g., printing and coating) and are compatible with high-throughput roll-to-roll processing. Moreover, printable electronic materials often allow the fabrication of sensors on flexible/stretchable/biodegradable substrates, thereby enabling the deployment of sensors in unconventional settings. Fulfilling the promise of printable electronic materials for sensing will require materials and device innovations to enhance their ability to transduce external stimuli—light, ionizing radiation, pressure, strain, force, temperature, gas, vapours, humidity, and other chemical and biological analytes. This Roadmap brings together the viewpoints of experts in various printable sensing materials—and devices thereof—to provide insights into the status and outlook of the field. Alongside recent materials and device innovations, the roadmap discusses the key outstanding challenges pertaining to each printable sensing technology. Finally, the Roadmap points to promising directions to overcome these challenges and thus enable ubiquitous sensing for a sustainable, ‘intelligent’ world

A Multi-functional Touch Panel for Multi-Dimensional Sensing in Interactive Displays

This thesis presents a flexible graphene/polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF)/graphene sandwich for three-dimensional touch interactivity. Here, an x-y plane touch is sensed using graphene capacitive elements, while force sensing in the z-direction is by a piezoelectric PVDF/graphene sandwich. By employing different frequency bands for the capacitive- and force-induced electrical signals, the two stimuli are detected simultaneously, achieving three-dimensional touch sensing. Static force sensing and elimination of propagated stress are achieved by augmenting the transient piezo output with the capacitive touch, thus overcoming the intrinsic inability of the piezoelectric material in detecting non-transient force signals and avoiding force touch mis-registration by propagated stress. As a capacitive signal is important for force touch interpretation, optimization algorithms have been developed and implemented. With correlated double sampling (CDS) and spatial low-pass filtering (SLPF) based techniques, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the capacitive touch signal is boosted by 15.6 dB, indicating improved detection accuracy. In terms of the readout speed, fixed pattern and random pattern related down-sampling techniques are applied, giving rise to reductions in both readout time (11.3 ms) and power consumption (8.79 mW).China Scholarship Counci

Towards Oxide Electronics:a Roadmap

At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore's law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics

Adaptive Multi-Functional Space Systems for Micro-Climate Control

This report summarizes the work done during the Adaptive Multifunctional Systems for Microclimate Control Study held at the Caltech Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) in 2014-2015. Dr. Marco Quadrelli (JPL), Dr. James Lyke (AFRL), and Prof. Sergio Pellegrino (Caltech) led the Study, which included two workshops: the first in May of 2014, and another in February of 2015. The Final Report of the Study presented here describes the potential relevance of adaptive multifunctional systems for microclimate control to the missions outlined in the 2010 NRC Decadal Survey. The objective of the Study was to adapt the most recent advances in multifunctional reconfigurable and adaptive structures to enable a microenvironment control to support space exploration in extreme environments (EE). The technical goal was to identify the most efficient materials, architectures, structures and means of deployment/reconfiguration, system autonomy and energy management solutions needed to optimally project/generate a micro-environment around space assets. For example, compact packed thin-layer reflective structures unfolding to large areas can reflect solar energy, warming and illuminating assets such as exploration rovers on Mars or human habitats on the Moon. This novel solution is called an energy-projecting multifunctional system (EPMFS), which are composed of Multifunctional Systems (MFS) and Energy-Projecting Systems (EPS)

EUROSENSORS XVII : book of abstracts

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkien (FCG).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Microscopy Conference 2017 (MC 2017) - Proceedings

Das Dokument enthält die Kurzfassungen der Beiträge aller Teilnehmer an der Mikroskopiekonferenz "MC 2017", die vom 21. bis 25.08.2017, in Lausanne stattfand